North-South Railway Connection

The railroad that met the Katy from the south had a long road. Paul Bremond and Thomas William House broke ground at Houston on January 1, 1853, and track reached Millican by 1861, before the Civil War stopped construction until 1867. Corsicana came in 1871, Dallas in 1872 and Denison in 1873. North of Corsicana the builders chose standard gauge over the state's required five feet six inches, and the older line was narrowed in stages from 1874 to 1877. The Handbook calls the junction at Denison the first all-rail route from Texas to St. Louis and the East.

What the plaque says

North-South Railway Connection On December 24, 1872, a Missouri, Kansas & Texas (Katy) Railroad train carrying 100 passengers arrived here in the newly established railroad town of Denison. Its arrival marked the culmination of years of effort by the Katy to construct a rail line from the border of Kansas and the Indian Territory (Oklahoma) south to the Red River and into Texas. The Katy earned this lucrative right-of-way by being first in a national competition to construct a rail line from St. Louis south to the Indian Territory. Several months later the unheralded connection of the nation's first north-to-south rail service west of the Mississippi River was established here when a Texas Central Railroad train pulled into Denison from the south on March 10, 1873. In a brief ceremony to commemorate the occasion Denison Mayor L. S. Owings addressed a small crowd by reading the contents of a telegram he had dispatched to Galveston, Houston, New York, Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, and San Francisco proclaiming his town's new role as a key link in the nation's network of rail lines. With this connection passengers and shippers could depend on continuous rail passage from the Texas Gulf Coast, where the Texas Central originated, through Denison to St. Louis where rail linkages extended north to Chicago, east to New York, and West to San Francisco. (1993)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Eisenhower Birthplace State Historic Site — 0.5 mi
  The small frame house beside the Katy tracks in Denison where Dwight Eisenhower was born in 1890, bought by townspeople in 1946 and given to Texas in 1958.
• Eisenhower State Park — 5.4 mi
  A bluff-top park on Lake Texoma opened in 1958 on land leased from the Corps of Engineers, in the Red River country of Fort Johnson, Colbert's Ferry and the Butterfield stages.
• Hagerman National Wildlife Refuge — 13 mi
  A 1946 refuge on the Big Mineral Arm of Lake Texoma, laid over land bought for Denison Dam and the site of the vanished railroad town of Hagerman, now a winter stop for geese.
• Choctaw Cultural Center — 16 mi
  The Choctaw Nation's history told from the Chahta side at Calera, with galleries from Nanih Waiya to the Trail of Tears and the reservation today, a living village and daily stickball.

More markers nearby

• Waples-Platter Grocery Company — steps away
• Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad — steps away
• Present Home of XXI Club — 0.3 mi
• Site of Saint Francis Xavier Academy — 0.4 mi